
Class TF SfOj:- 
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OTHER WORKS OF 

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 



Poems and Plats, 2 volumes: 
I — Lyrics. $2.00. 
n — Dramatic Poems. S2.00. 

The Celtic Twilight. $1.50. 

Ideas of Good and Evil. $1.50. 

Stories of Red Hanrahan. $1.25. 

Reveries over Childhood and Youth. Illus- 
trated. $2.00. 

Responsibilities and Other Poems. $1.25. 

The Tables of the Law. $1.25. 

The Hour Glass and Other Plays. $1.25. 

The Green Helmet and Other Poems. $1.25. 

The Cutting of an Agate. $1.50. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 



SPECIAL 
LIMITED EDITION 



PER AMIGA 
SILENTIA LUNAE 



BY 

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1918 

All rights reserved 






COPTBIOHT, 1918, 

bt the macmillan company. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1918. 



J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



JAN 19 1318 



©CI.A4814H0 ^ 



PROLOGUE 

My Dear "Maurice"— You will remember 
that afternoon in Calvados last summer when 
your black Persian "Minoulooshe," who had 
walked behind us for a good mile, heard a 
wing flutter in a bramble-bush ? For a long 
time we called her endearing names in vain. 
She seemed resolute to spend her night among 
the brambles. She had interrupted a conver- 
sation, often interrupted before, upon certain 
thoughts so long habitual that I may be per- 
mitted to call them my convictions. When I 
came back to London my mind ran again and 
again to those conversations and I could not 
rest till I had written out in this little book 
all that I had said or would have said. Read 
it some day when " Minoulooshe " is asleep. 

W. B. YEATS. 

May 11, 1917. 



EGO DOMINUS TUUS 

Hic 

On the grey sand beside the shallow stream. 
Under your old wind-beaten tower, where 

still 
A lamp burns on above the open book 
That Michael Robartes left, you walk in the 

moon. 
And, though you have passed the best of 

life, still trace. 
Enthralled by the unconquerable delusion, 
Magical shapes. 

Ille 

By the help of an image 
I call to my own opposite, summon all 
That I have handled least, least looked upon. 

9 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

Hic 
And I would find myself and not an image. 

Ille 
That is our modern hope, and by its light 
We have lit upon the gentle, sensitive mind 
And lost the old nonchalance of the hand ; 
Whether we have chosen chisel, pen, or 

brush. 
We are but critics, or but half create. 
Timid, entangled, empty, and abashed. 
Lacking the countenance of our friends. 

Hic 

And yet. 
The chief imagination of Christendom, 
Dante Alighieri, so utterly found himself. 
That he has made that hollow face of his 
More plain to the mind's eye than any face 
But that of Christ. 

10 



EGO DOMINUS TUUS 

Ille 

And did he find himself, 
Or was the hunger that had made it hollow 
A hunger for the apple on the bough 
Most out of reach? And is that spectral 

image 
The man that Lapo and that Guido knew ? 
I think he fashioned from his opposite 
An image that might have been a stony 

face, 
Staring upon a Beduin's horse-hair roof, 
From doored and windowed cliff, or half up- 
turned 
Among the coarse grass and the camel dung. 
He set his chisel to the hardest stone ; 
Being mocked by Guido for his lecherous 

hfe. 
Derided and deriding, driven out 
To climb that stair and eat that bitter bread, 

11 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

He found the unpersuadable justice, he 

found 
The most exalted lady loved by a man. 

Hic 

Yet surely there are men who have made their 

art 
Out of no tragic war ; lovers of life, 
Impulsive men, that look for happiness, 
And sing when they have found it. 

Ille 

No, not sing, 
For those that love the world serve it in 

action. 
Grow rich, popular, and full of influence ; 
And should they paint or write still is it 

action, 
The struggle of the fly in marmalade. 
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, 

12 



EGO DOMINUS TUUS 

The sentimentalist himself ; while art 

Is but a vision of reality. 

What portion in the world can the artist 

have, 
Who has awakened from the common dream. 
But dissipation and despair? 

Hic 

And yet. 

No one denies to Keats love of the world. 
Remember his deliberate happiness. 

Ille 
His art is happy, but who knows his mind ? 
I see a schoolboy, when I think of him, 
With face and nose pressed to a sweetshop 

window. 
For certainly he sank into his grave. 
His senses and his heart unsatisfied ; 
And made — being poor, ailing and igno- 
rant, 

13 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

Shut out from all the luxury of the world, 
The ill-bred son of a livery stable keeper — 
Luxuriant song. 

Hic 
Why should you leave the lamp 
Burning alone beside an open book, 
And trace these characters upon the sand ? 
A style is found by sedentary toil, 
And by the imitation of great masters. 

Ille 
Because I seek an image, not a book ; 
Those men that in their writings are most 

wise 
Own nothing but their blind, stupefied 

hearts. 
I call to the mysterious one who yet 
Shall walk the wet sand by the water's edge, 
And look most like me, being indeed my 

double, 

14 



EGO DOMINUS TUUS 

And prove of all imaginable things 
The most unlike, being my anti-self, 
And, standing by these characters, disclose 
All that I seek; and whisper it as though 
He were afraid the birds, who cry aloud 
Their momentary cries before it is dawn. 
Would carry it away to blasphemous men. 

December 1915. 



15 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

ANIMA HOMINIS 



When I come home after meeting men who 
are strange to me, and sometimes even 
after talking to women, I go over all I have 
said in gloom and disappointment. Per- 
haps I have overstated everything from a 
desire to vex or startle, from hostility that 
is but fear ; or all my natural thoughts have 
been drowned by an undisciplined sympa- 
thy. My fellow-diners have hardly seemed 
of mixed humanity, and how should I keep 
my head among images of good and evil, 
crude allegories. 

c 17 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

But when I shut my door and light the 
candle, I invite a Marmorean Muse, an art, 
where no thought or emotion has come to 
mind because another man has thought or 
felt something different, for now there must 
be no reaction, action only, and the world 
must move my heart but to the heart's dis- 
covery of itself, and I begin to dream of eye- 
lids that do not quiver before the bayonet : 
all my thoughts have ease and joy, I am 
all virtue and confidence. WTien I come to 
put in rhyme what I have found it will 
be a hard toil, but for a moment I be- 
lieve I have found myself and not my 
anti-self. It is only the shrinking from 
toil perhaps that convinces me that I 
have been no more myself than is the 
cat the medicinal grass it is eating in the 
garden. 

How could I have mistaken for myself 
18 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

an heroic condition that from early boy- 
hood has made me superstitious? That 
which comes as complete, as minutely or- 
ganised, as are those elaborate, brightly 
lighted buildings and sceneries appearing in 
a moment, as I lie between sleeping and 
waking, must come from above me and 
beyond me. At times I remember that 
place in Dante where he sees in his chamber 
the "Lord of Terrible Aspect,'* and how, 
seeming "to rejoice inwardly that it was a 
marvel to see, speaking, he said, many things 
among the which I could understand but 
few, and of these this: ego dominus tuus"; 
or should the conditions come, not as it 
were in a gesture — as the image of a man — 
but in some fine landscape, it is of Boehme, 
maybe, that I think, and of that country 
where we "eternally solace ourselves in the 
excellent beautiful flourishing of all manner 

19 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

of flowers and forms, both trees and plants, 
and all kinds of fruit." 

11 

When I consider the minds of my friends, 
among artists and emotional writers, I dis- 
cover a like contrast. I have sometimes 
told one close friend that her only fault is 
a habit of harsh judgment with those who 
have not her sympathy, and she has written 
comedies where the wickedest people seem 
but bold children. She does not know why 
she has created that world where no one is 
ever judged, a high celebration of indulgence, 
but to me it seems that her ideal of beauty 
is the compensating dream of a nature wearied 
out by over-much judgment. I know a 
famous actress who in private life is like the 
captain of some buccaneer ship holding his 
crew to good behaviour at the mouth of a 

20 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

blunderbuss, and upon the stage she excels 
in the representation of women who stir to 
pity and to desire because they need our 
protection, and is most adorable as one of 
those young queens imagined by Maeter- 
linck who have so little will, so little self, 
that they are like shadows sighing at the 
edge of the world. When I last saw her in 
her own house she lived in a torrent of words 
and movements, she could not listen, and 
all about her upon the walls were women 
drawn by Burne-Jones in his latest period. 
She had invited me in the hope that I would 
defend those women, who were always listen- 
ing, and are as necessary to her as a contem- 
plative Buddha to a Japanese Samurai, 
against a French critic who would persuade 
her to take into her heart in their stead a 
Post-Impressionist picture of a fat, ruddy, 
nude woman lying upon a Turkey carpet. 

21 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

There are indeed certain men whose art 
is less an opposing virtue than a compen- 
sation for some accident of health or circum- 
stance. During the riots over the first pro- 
duction of the Playboy of the Western World 
Synge was confused, without clear thought, 
and was soon ill — indeed the strain of that 
week may perhaps have hastened his death 
— and he was, as is usual with gentle and 
silent men, scrupulously accurate in all his 
statements. In his art he made, to delight 
his ear and his mind's eye, voluble dare- 
devils who *'go romancing through a romp- 
ing lifetime ... to the dawning of the Judg- 
ment Day." At other moments this man, 
condemned to the life of a monk by bad 
health, takes an amused pleasure in "great 
queens . . . making themselves matches from 
the start to the end." Indeed, in all his 
imagination he delights in fine physical life, 

22 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

in life where the moon pulls up the tide. 
The last act of Deirdre of the Sorrows, where 
his art is at its noblest, was written upon 
his death-bed. He was not sure of any 
world to come, he was leaving his betrothed 
and his unwritten play — "Oh, what a waste 
of time," he said to me ; he hated to die, and 
in the last speeches of Deirdre and in the 
middle act he accepted death and dismissed 
life with a gracious gesture. He gave to 
Deirdre the emotion that seemed to him most 
desirable, most difficult, most fitting, and 
maybe saw in those delighted seven years, 
now dwindling from her, the fulfilment of 
his own life. 

Ill 

When I think of any great poetical writer 
of the past (a realist is an historian and ob- 
scures the cleavage by the record of his eyes) 

23 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

I comprehend, if I know the Hneaments of his 
life, that the work is the man's flight from 
his entire horoscope, his bhnd struggle in 
the network of the stars. WilHam Morris, 
a happy, busy, most irascible man, described 
dim colour and pensive emotion, following, 
beyond any man of his time, an indolent 
muse; while Savage Landor topped us all 
in calm nobility when the pen was in his 
hand, as in the daily violence of his passion 
when he had laid it down. He had in his 
Imaginary Conversations reminded us, as it 
were, that the Venus de Milo is a stone, and 
yet he wrote when the copies did not come 
from the printer as soon as he expected: "I 
have . . . had the resolution to tear in pieces 
all my sketches and projects and to forswear 
all future undertakings. I have tried to 
sleep away my time and pass two-thirds of 
the twenty -four hours in bed. I may speak 

24 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

of myself as a dead man." I imagine Keats 
to have been born with that thirst for luxury 
common to many at the outsetting of the 
Romantic Movement, and not able, like 
wealthy Beckford, to slake it with beautiful 
and strange objects. It drove him to im- 
aginary delights ; ignorant, poor, and in poor 
health, and not perfectly well-bred, he knew 
himself driven from tangible luxury ; meet- 
ing Shelley, he was resentful and suspicious 
because he, as Leigh Hunt recalls, "being 
a little too sensitive on the score of his origin, 
felt inclined to see in every man of birth his 
natural enemy." 

IV 

Some thirty years ago I read a prose alle- 
gory by Simeon Solomon, long out of print 
and unprocurable, and remember or seem 
to remember a sentence, "a hollow image of 

25 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

fulfilled desire." All happy art seems to me 
that hollow image, but when its lineaments 
express also the poverty or the exasperation 
that set its maker to the work, we call it 
tragic art. Keats but gave us his dream of 
luxury ; but while reading Dante we never 
long escape the conflict, partly because the 
verses are at moments a mirror of his history, 
and yet more because that history is so clear 
and simple that it has the quality of art. I 
am no Dante scholar, and I but read him in 
Shadwell or in Dante Rossetti, but I am 
always persuaded that he celebrated the 
most pure lady poet ever sung and the Divine 
Justice, not merely because death took that 
lady and Florence banished her singer, but 
because he had to struggle in his own heart 
with his unjust anger and his lust ; while 
unlike those of the great poets, who are at 
peace with the world and at war with them- 

26 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

selves, he fought a double war. "Always,'* 
says Boccaccio, "both in youth and ma- 
turity he found room among his virtues for 
lechery"; or as Matthew Arnold preferred 
to change the phrase, "his conduct was ex- 
ceeding irregular." Guido Cavalcanti, as 
Rossetti translates him, finds "too much 
baseness" in his friend : 

"And still thy speech of me, heartfelt and 

kind. 
Hath made me treasure up thy poetry ; 
But now I dare not, for thy abject life, 
Make manifest that I approve thy rhymes." 

And when Dante meets Beatrice in Eden, 
does she not reproach him because, when 
she had taken her presence away, he followed 
in spite of warning dreams, false images, and 
now, to save him in his own despite, she has 
" visited . . . the Portals of the Dead," and 

27 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

chosen Virgil for his courier? While Gino 
da Pistoia complains that in his Commedia 
his ** lovely heresies . . . beat the right down 
and let the wrong go free" : 

*' Therefore his vain decrees, wherein he 

lied, 
Must be like empty nutshells flung aside ; 
Yet through the rash false witness set to 

grow, 
French and Italian vengeance on such pride 
May fall like Anthony on Cicero." 

Dante himself sings to Giovanni Guirino 
"at the approach of death" ; 

"The King, by whose rich grave his servants 

be 
With plenty beyond measure set to dwell, 
Ordains that I my bitter wrath dispel, 
And lift mine eyes to the great Consistory." 

28 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

V 

We make out of the quarrel with others, 
rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, 
poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get 
a confident voice from remembering the 
crowd they have won or may win, we sing 
amid our uncertainty ; and, smitten even 
in the presence of the most high beauty by 
the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm 
shudders. I think, too, that no fine poet, 
no matter how disordered his life, has ever, 
even in his mere life, had pleasure for his end. 
Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth, 
were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, 
the other a drunkard and mad about women, 
and yet they had the gravity of men who 
had found life out and were awakening from 
the dream ; and both, one in life and art and 
one in art and less in life, had a continual 

29 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

preoccupation with religion. Nor has any 
poet I have read of or heard of or met with 
been a sentimentahst. The other self, the 
anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may 
choose to name it, comes but to those who are 
no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. 
The sentimentalists are practical men who 
believe in money, in position, in a marriage 
bell, and whose understanding of happiness 
is to be so busy whether at work or at play, 
that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. 
They find their pleasure in a cup that is 
filled from Lethe's wharf, and for the awaken- 
ing, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, 
tradition offers us a different word — ecstasy. 
An old artist wrote to me of his wanderings 
by the quays of New York, and how he found 
there a woman nursing a sick child, and 
drew her story from her. She spoke, too, 
of other children who had died : a long tragic 

30 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

story. "I wanted to paint her," he wrote, 
"if I denied myself any of the pain I could 
not believe in my own ecstasy." We must 
not make a false faith by hiding from our 
thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the 
highest achievement of the human intellect, 
the only gift man can make to God, and 
therefore it must be offered in sincerity. 
Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, 
a false beauty as our offering to the world. 
He only can create the greatest imaginable 
beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, 
for only when we have seen and foreseen 
what we dread shall we be rewarded by that 
dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. 
We could not find him if he were not in some 
sense of our being and yet of our being but 
as water with fire, a noise with silence. He 
is of all things not impossible the most dif- 
ficult, for that only which comes easily can 

31 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

never be a portion of our being, "Soon got, 
soon gone," as the proverb says. I shall 
find the dark grow luminous, the void fruit- 
ful when I understand I have nothing, that 
the ringers in the tower have appointed for 
the hymen of the soul a passing bell. 

The last knowledge has often come most 
quickly to turbulent men, and for a season 
brought new turbulence. When life puts 
away her conjuring tricks one by one, those 
that deceive us longest may well be the wine- 
cup and the sensual kiss, for our Chambers 
of Commerce and of Commons have not the 
divine architecture of the body, nor has their 
frenzy been ripened by the sun. The poet, 
because he may not stand within the sacred 
house but lives amid the whirlwinds that 
beset its threshold, may find his pardon. 



32 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

VI 

I think the Christian saint and hero, in- 
stead of being merely dissatisfied, make de- 
Hberate sacrifice. I remember reading once 
an autobiography of a man who had made a 
daring journey in disguise to Russian exiles 
in Siberia, and his telling how, very timid 
as a child, he schooled himself by wander- 
ing at night through dangerous streets. 
Saint and hero cannot be content to pass 
at moments to that hollow image and after 
become their heterogeneous selves, but would 
always, if they could, resemble the anti- 
thetical self. There is a shadow of type on 
type, for in all great poetical styles there is 
saint or hero, but when it is all over Dante 
can return to his chambering and Shake- 
speare to his "pottle pot." They sought 
no impossible perfection but when they 
D 33 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

handled paper or parchment. So too will 
saint or hero, because he works in his own 
flesh and blood and not in paper or parch- 
ment, have more deliberate understanding 
of that other flesh and blood. 

Some years ago I began to believe that 
our culture, with its doctrine of sincerity 
and self-realisation, made us gentle and 
passive, and that the Middle Ages and the 
Renaissance were right to found theirs upon 
the imitation of Christ or of some classic 
hero. St. Francis and Caesar Borgia made 
themselves over-mastering, creative persons 
by turning from the mirror to meditation 
upon a mask. When I had this thought I 
could see nothing else in life. I could not 
write the play I had planned, for all became 
allegorical, and though I tore up hundreds 
of pages in my endeavour to escape from 
allegory, my imagination became sterile for 

34 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

nearly five years and I only escaped at last 
when I had mocked in a comedy my own 
thought. I was always thinking of the ele- 
ment of imitation in style and in life, and of 
the life beyond heroic imitation. I find in 
an old diary: "I think all happiness depends 
on the energy to assume the mask of some 
other life, on a re-birth as something not one's 
self, something created in a moment and 
perpetually renewed ; in playing a game like 
that of a child where one loses the infinite 
pain of self-realisation, in a grotesque or 
solemn painted face put on that one may 
hide from the terror of judgment. . . . 
Perhaps all the sins and energies of the world 
are but the world's flight from an infinite 
blinding beam"; and again at an earlier 
date: "If we cannot imagine ourselves as 
different from what we are, and try to as- 
sume that second self, we cannot impose a 

35 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

discipline upon ourselves though we may 
accept one from others. Active virtue, as 
distinguished from the passive acceptance 
of a code, is therefore theatrical, consciously 
dramatic, the wearing of a mask. . . . 
Wordsworth, great poet though he be, is 
so often flat and heavy partly because his 
moral sense, being a discipline he had not 
created, a mere obedience, has no theatrical 
element. This increases his popularity with 
the better kind of journalists and politicians 
who have written books." 

VII 

I thought the hero found hanging upon 
some oak of Dodona an ancient mask, where 
perhaps there lingered something of Egypt, 
and that he changed it to his fancy, touching 
it a little here and there, gilding the eye- 
brows or putting a gilt line where the cheek- 

36 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

bone comes ; that when at last he looked out 
of its eyes he knew another's breath came 
and went within his breath upon the carven 
lips, and that his eyes were upon the instant 
fixed upon a visionary world : how else could 
the god have come to us in the forest? The 
good, unlearned books say that He who keeps 
the distant stars within His fold comes with- 
out intermediary, but Plutarch's precepts 
and the experience of old women in Soho, 
ministering their witchcraft to servant girls 
at a shilling apiece, will have it that a strange 
living man may win for Daemon an illus- 
trious dead man ; but now I add another 
thought : the Daemon comes not as like to 
like but seeking its own opposite, for man 
and Daemon feed the hunger in one another's 
hearts. Because the ghost is simple, the 
man heterogeneous and confused, they are 
but knit together when the man has found a 

37 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

mask whose lineaments permit the expres- 
sion of all the man most lacks, and it may 
be dreads, and of that only. 

The more insatiable in all desire, the more 
resolute to refuse deception or an easy vic- 
tory, the more close will be the bond, the 
more violent and definite the antipathy. 

VIII 

I think that all religious men have be- 
lieved that there is a hand not ours in the 
events of life, and that, as somebody says 
in Wilhelm Meister, accident is destiny; and 
I think it was Heraclitus who said : the 
Daemon is our destiny. When I think of 
life as a struggle with the Daemon who would 
ever set us to the hardest work among those 
not impossible, I understand why there is a 
deep enmity between a man and his destiny, 
and why a man loves nothing but his destiny. 

38 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

In an Anglo-Saxon poem a certain man is 
called, as though to call him something that 
summed up all heroism, "Doom eager." 
I am persuaded that the Daemon delivers 
and deceives us, and that he wove that netting 
from the stars and threw the net from his 
shoulder. Then my imagination runs from 
Daemon to sweetheart, and I divine an 
analogy that evades the intellect. I re- 
member that Greek antiquity has bid us 
look for the principal stars, that govern 
enemy and sweetheart alike, among those 
that are about to set, in the Seventh House 
as the astrologers say; and that -it may be 
"sexual love," which is "founded upon 
spiritual hate," is an image of the warfare 
of man and Daemon ; and I even wonder 
if there may not be some secret communion, 
some whispering in the dark between Daemon 
and sweetheart. I remember how often 

39 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

women, when in love, grow superstitious, 
and believe that they can bring their lovers 
good luck; and I remember an old Irish 
story of three young men who went seeking 
for help in battle into the house of the gods at 
Slieve-na-mon. "You must first be married," 
some god told them, "because a man's good 
or evil luck comes to him through a woman." 
I sometimes fence for half -an -hour at the 
day's end, and when I close my eyes upon 
the pillow I see a foil playing before me, the 
button to my face. We meet always in the 
deep of the mind, whatever our work, wher- 
ever our reverie carries us, that other Will. 

IX 

The poet finds and makes his mask in dis- 
appointment, the hero in defeat. The de- 
sire that is satisfied is not a great desire, nor 
has the shoulder used all its might that an 

40 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

unbreakable gate has never strained. The 
saint alone is not deceived, neither thrust- 
ing with his shoulder nor holding out un- 
satisfied hands. He would climb without 
wandering to the antithetical self of the 
world, the Indian narrowing his thought in 
meditation or driving it away in contem- 
plation, the Christian copying Christ, the 
antithetical self of the classic world. For 
a hero loves the world till it breaks him, and 
the poet till it has broken faith ; but while 
the world was yet debonair, the saint has 
turned away, and because he renounced Ex- 
perience itself, he will wear his mask as he 
finds it. The poet or the hero, no matter 
upon what bark they found their mask, so 
teeming their fancy, somewhat change its 
lineaments, but the saint, whose life is but a 
round of customary duty, needs nothing the 
whole world does not need, and day by day 

41 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

he scourges in his body the Roman and 
Christian conquerors : Alexander and Caesar 
are famished in his cell. His nativity is 
neither in disappointment nor in defeat, 
but in a temptation like that of Christ in 
the Wilderness, a contemplation in a single 
instant perpetually renewed of the Kingdom 
of the World ; all, because all renounced, 
continually present showing their empty 
thrones. Edwin Ellis, remembering that 
Christ also measured the sacrifice, imagined 
himself in a fine poem as meeting at Gol- 
gotha the phantom of "Christ the Less," 
the Christ who might have lived a pros- 
perous life without the knowledge of sin, and 
who now wanders " companionless a weary 
spectre day and night." 

"I saw him go and cried to him 
'Eli, thou hast forsaken me.' 

42 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

The nails were burning through each Hmb, 
He fled to find feHcity." 

And yet is the saint spared, despite his 
martyr's crown and his vigil of desire, defeat, 
disappointed love, and the sorrow of parting. 

*'0 Night, that did'st lead thus, 
O Night, more lovely than the dawn of 

light, 
O Night, that broughtest us 
Lover to lover's sight. 
Lover with loved in marriage of delight ! 

Upon my flowery breast, 

Wholly for him, and save himself for none, 

There did I give sweet rest 

To my beloved one ; 

The fanning of the cedars breathed thereon. 

Wlien the first morning air 
Blew from the tower, and waved his locks 
aside, 

43 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

His hand, with gentle care, 
Did wound me in the side, 
And in my body all my senses died. 

All things I then forgot, 

My cheek on him who for my coming 

came; 
All ceased and I was not, 
Leaving my cares and shame 
Among the lilies, and forgetting them." ^ 

X 

It is not permitted to a man, who takes 
up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for 
passion is his only business, and he cannot 
but mould or sing after a new fashion be- 
cause no disaster is like another. He is like 
those phantom lovers in the Japanese play 
who, compelled to wander side by side and 

1 Translated by Arthur Symons from San Juan de la Cruz. 

44 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

never mingle, cry: "We neither wake nor 
sleep and passing our nights in a sorrow which 
is in the end a vision, what are these scenes 
of spring to us?" If when we have found 
a mask we fancy that it will not match our 
mood till we have touched with gold the 
cheek, we do it furtively, and only where the 
oaks of Dodona cast their deepest shadow, 
for could he see our handiwork the Daemon 
would fling himself out, being our enemy. 

XI 

Many years ago I saw, between sleeping 
and waking, a woman of incredible beauty 
shooting an arrow into the sky, and from the 
moment when I made my first guess at her 
meaning I have thought much of the differ- 
ence between the winding movement of 
nature and the straight line, which is called 
in Balzac's Seraphita the "Mark of Man," 

45 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

but comes closer to my meaning as the mark 
of saint or sage. I think that we who are 
poets and artists, not being permitted to 
shoot beyond the tangible, must go from 
desire to weariness and so to desire again, and 
live but for the moment when vision comes 
to our weariness like terrible lightning, in 
the humility of the brutes. I do not doubt 
those heaving circles, those winding arcs, 
whether in one man's life or in that of an 
age, are mathematical, and that some in the 
world, or beyond the world, have foreknown 
the event and pricked upon the calendar 
the life-span of a Christ, a Buddha, a Na- 
poleon : that every movement, in feeling or 
in thought, prepares in the dark by its own 
increasing clarity and confidence its own 
executioner. We seek reality with the slow 
toil of our weakness and are smitten from the 
boundless and the unforeseen. Only when 

46 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

we are saint or sage, and renounce Experi- 
ence itself, can we, in the language of the 
Christian Caballa, le^ve the sudden lightning 
and the path of the serpent and become the 
bowman who aims his arrow at the centre of 

the sun. 

XII 

The doctors of medicine have discovered 
that certain dreams of the night, for I do not 
grant them all, are the day's unfulfilled de- 
sire, and that our terror of desires condemned 
by the conscience has distorted and dis- 
turbed our dreams. They have only studied 
the breaking into dream of elements that 
have remained unsatisfied without purify- 
ing discouragement. We can satisfy in life 
a few of our passions and each passion but 
a little, and our characters indeed but differ 
because no two men bargain alike. The 
bargain, the compromise, is always threat- 

47 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

ened, and when it is broken we become mad 
or hysterical or are in some way deluded ; 
and so when a starved or banished passion 
shows in a dream we, before awaking, break 
the logic that had given it the capacity of 
action and throw it into chaos again. But 
the passions, when we know that they can- 
not find fulfilment, become vision ; and a 
vision, whether we wake or sleep, prolongs 
its power by rhythm and pattern, the wheel 
where the world is butterfly. We need no 
protection, but it does, for if we become in- 
terested in ourselves, in our own lives, we 
pass out of the vision. Whether it is we 
or the vision that create the pattern, who 
set the wheel turning, it is hard to say, but 
certainly we have a hundred ways of keep- 
ing it near us : we select our images from 
past times, we turn from our own age and 
try to feel Chaucer nearer than the daily 

48 



ANIMA HOMINIS 

paper. It compels us to cover all it cannot 
incorporate, and would carry us when it 
conies in sleep to that moment when even 
sleep closes her eyes and dreams begin to 
dream; and we are taken up into a clear 
light and are forgetful even of our own names 
and actions and yet in perfect possession of 
ourselves murmur like Faust, "Stay, mo- 
ment," and murmur in vain. 

XIII 

A poet, when he is growing old, will ask 
himself if he cannot keep his mask and 
his vision without new bitterness, new 
disappointment. Could he if he would, 
knowing how frail his vigour from youth 
up, copy Landor who lived loving and hat- 
ing, ridiculous and unconquered, into ex- 
treme old age, all lost but the favour of his 
muses. 

E 49 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE' 

The mother of the muses we are taught 
Is memory ; she has left me ; they remain 
And shake my shoulder urging me to sing. 

Surely, he may think, now that I have 
found vision and mask I need not suffer any 
longer. He will buy perhaps some small old 
house where like Ariosto he can dig his 
garden, and think that in the return of birds 
and leaves, or moon and sun, and in the even- 
ing flight of the rooks he may discover 
rhythm and pattern like those in sleep and 
so never awake out of vision. Then he will 
remember Wordsworth withering into eighty 
years, honoured and empty-witted, and climb 
to some waste room and find, forgotten there 
by youth, some bitter crust. 

February 25, 1917. 



50 



ANIMA MUNDI 



I HAVE always sought to bring my mind close 
to the mind of Indian and Japanese poets, 
old women in Connaught, mediums in Soho, 
lay brothers whom I imagine dreaming in 
some mediaeval monastery the dreams of 
their village, learned authors who refer all 
to antiquity; to immerse it in the general 
mind where that mind is scarce separable 
from what we have begun to call "the sub- 
conscious " ; to liberate it from all that comes 
of councils and committees, from the world 
as it is seen from universities or from popu- 
lous towns ; and that I might so believe I 
have murmured evocations and frequented 
mediums, delighted in all that displayed 

51 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

great problems through sensuous images, or 
exciting phrases, accepting from abstract 
schools but a few technical words that are 
so old they seem but broken architraves 
fallen amid bramble and grass, and have put 
myself to school where all things are seen: 
A Tenedo Tacitae per Arnica Silentia Lunae. 
At one time I thought to prove my conclu- 
sions by quoting from diaries where I have 
recorded certain strange events the moment 
they happened, but now I have changed my 
mind — I will but say like the Arab boy that 
became Vizier: "O brother, I have taken 
stock in the desert sand and of the sayings of 

antiquity." 

II 

There is a letter of Goethe's, though I 
cannot remember where, that explains evo- 
cation, though he was but thinking of litera- 
ture. He described some friend who had 

52 



ANIMA MUNDI 

complained of literary sterility as too intelli- 
gent. One must allow the images to form 
with all their associations before one criticises. 
*'If one is critical too soon," he wrote, "they 
will not form at all." If you suspend the 
critical faculty, I have discovered, either as 
the result of training, or, if you have the 
gift, by passing into a slight trance, images 
pass rapidly before you. If you can suspend 
also desire, and let them form at their own 
will, your absorption becomes more complete 
and they are more clear in colour, more pre- 
cise in articulation, and you and they begin 
to move in the midst of what seems a power- 
ful light. But the images pass before you 
linked by certain associations, and indeed 
in the first instance you have called them up 
by their association with traditional forms 
and sounds. You have discovered how, if 
you can but suspend will and intellect, to 

53 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

bring up from the "subconscious" anything 
you already possess a fragment of. Those 
who follow the old rule keep their bodies still 
and their minds awake and clear, dreading 
especially any confusion between the images 
of the mind and the objects of sense; they 
seek to become, as it were, polished mirrors. 

I had no natural gift for this clear quiet, 
as I soon discovered, for my mind is ab- 
normally restless; and I was seldom de- 
lighted by that sudden luminous definition 
of form which makes one understand almost 
in spite of oneself that one is not merely 
imagining. I therefore invented a new pro- 
cess. I had found that after evocation my 
sleep became at moments full of light and 
form, all that I had failed to find while awake ; 
and I elaborated a symbolism of natural ob- 
jects that I might give myself dreams during 
sleep, or rather visions, for they had none of 

54 



ANIMA MUNDI 

the confusion of dreams, by laying upon my 
pillow or beside my bed certain flowers or 
leaves. Even to-day, after twenty years, 
the exaltations and the messages that came 
to me from bits of hawthorn or some other 
plant seem of all moments of my life the 
happiest and the wisest. After a time, per- 
haps because the novelty wearing off the 
symbol lost its power, or because my work at 
the Irish Theatre became too exciting, my 
sleep lost its responsiveness. I had fellow- 
scholars, and now it was I and now they who 
made some discovery. Before the mind's 
eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images 
that one was to discover presently in some 
book one had never read, and after looking 
in vain for explanation to the current theory 
of forgotten personal memory, I came to be- 
lieve in a great memory passing on from 
generation to generation. But that was not 

55 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

enough, for these images showed intention 
and choice. They had a relation to what 
one knew and yet were an extension of one's 
knowledge. If no mind was there, why 
should I suddenly come upon salt and anti- 
mony, upon the liquefaction of the gold, as 
they were understood by the alchemists, or 
upon some detail of cabalistic symbolism 
verified at last by a learned scholar from his 
never-published manuscripts, and who can 
have put together so ingeniously, working by 
some law of association and yet with clear 
intention and personal application, certain 
mythological images. They had shown them- 
selves to several minds, a fragment at a time, 
and had only shown their meaning when the 
puzzle picture had been put together. The 
thought was again and again before me that 
this study had created a contact or mingling 
with minds who had followed a like study in 

56 



ANIMA MUNDI 

some other age, and that these minds still 
saw and thought and chose. Our daily 
thought was certainly but the line of foam 
at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea : 
Henry More's Anima Mundi, Wordsworth's 
"immortal sea which brought us hither . . . 
and near whose edge the children sport," 
and in that sea there were some who swam 
or sailed, explorers who perhaps knew all its 
shores. 

Ill 
I had always to compel myself to fix the 
imagination upon the minds behind the per- 
sonifications, and yet the personifications 
were themselves living and vivid. The 
minds that swayed these seemingly fluid 
images had doubtless form, and those images 
themselves seemed, as it were, mirrored in a 
living substance whose form is but change 
of form. From tradition and perception, 

57 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

one thought of one's own Hfe as symbohsed 
by earth, the place of heterogeneous things, 
the images as mirrored in water and the 
images themselves one could divine but as 
air; and beyond it all there was, I felt con- 
fident, certain aims and governing loves, 
the fire that makes all simple. Yet the 
images themselves were fourfold, and one 
judged their meaning in part from the pre- 
dominance of one out of the four elements, 
or that of the fifth element, the veil hiding 
another four, a bird born out of the fire. 

IV 

I longed to know something even if it were 
but the family and Christian names of those 
minds that I could divine, and that yet re- 
mained always as it seemed impersonal. The 
sense of contact came perhaps but two or 
three times with clearness and certainty, but 

58 



ANIMA MUNDI 

it left among all to whom it came some trace, 
a sudden silence, as it were, in the midst of 
thought or perhaps at moments of crisis a 
faint voice. Were our masters right when 
they declared so solidly that we should be 
content to loiow these presences that seemed 
friendly and near but as *'the phantom" in 
Coleridge's poem, and to think of them per- 
haps, as having, as St. Thomas says, entered 
upon the eternal possession of themselves in 
one single moment ? 

*'A11 look and likeness caught from earth, 
All accident of kin and birth. 
Had passed away. There was no trace 
Of ought on that illumined face. 
Upraised beneath the rifted stone. 
But of one spirit all her own ; 
She, she herself and only she. 
Shone through her body visibly." 
59 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 



One night I heard a voice that said : 
*'The love of God for every human soul is 
infinite, for every human soul is unique ; no 
other can satisfy the same need in God." 
Our masters had not denied that personality 
outlives the body or even that its rougher 
shape may cling to us a while after death, but 
only that we should seek it in those who are 
dead. Yet when I went among the country 
people, I found that they sought and found 
the old fragilities, infirmities, physiognomies 
that living stirred affection. The Spiddal 
knowledgeable man, who had his knowledge 
from his sister's ghost, noticed every hal- 
lowe'en, when he met her at the end of the 
garden, that her hair was greyer. Had she 
perhaps to exhaust her allotted years in the 
neighbourhood of her home, having died be- 

60 



ANIMA MUNDI 

fore her time ? Because no authority seemed 

greater than that of this knowledge running 

backward to the beginning of the world, I 

began that study of spiritism so despised by 

Stanislas de Gaeta, the one eloquent learned 

scholar who has written of magic in our 

generation. 

VI 

I know much that I could never have 
known had I not learnt to consider in the 
after life what, there as here, is rough and 
disjointed ; nor have I found that the mediums 
in Connaught and Soho have anything I can- 
not find some light on in Henry More, who 
was called during his life the holiest man now 
walking upon the earth. 

All souls have a vehicle or body, and when 
one has said that, with More and the Pla- 
tonists one has escaped from the abstract 
schools who seek always the power of some 

61 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

church or institution, and found oneself with 
great poetry, and superstition which is but 
popular poetry, in a pleasant dangerous 
world. Beauty is indeed but bodily life in 
some ideal condition. The vehicle of the 
human soul is what used to be called the 
animal spirits, and Henry More quotes from 
Hippocrates this sentence: *'The mind of 
man is . . . not nourished from meats and 
drinks from the belly, but by a clear lumi- 
nous substance that redounds by separation 
from the blood." These animal spirits fill 
up all parts of the body and make up the body 
of air, as certain writers of the seventeenth 
century have called it. The soul has a plastic 
power, and can after death, or during life, 
should the vehicle leave the body for a while, 
mould it to any shape it will by an act of 
imagination, though the more unlike to the 
habitual that shape is, the greater the effort. 



ANIMA MUNDI 

To living and dead alike, the purity and 
abundance of the animal spirits are a chief 
power. The soul can mould from these an 
apparition clothed as if in life, and make it 
visible by showing it to our mind's eye, or by 
building into its substance certain particles 
drawn from the body of a medium till it is as 
visible and tangible as any other object. "^To 
help that building the ancients offered fragrant 
gum, the odour of flowers, and it may be pieces 
of virgin wax. The half materialised vehicle 
slowly exudes from the skin in dull luminous 
drops or condenses from a luminous cloud, 
the light fading as weight and density in- 
crease. The witch, going beyond the mediiun, 
offered to the slowly animating phantom 
certain drops of her blood. The vehicle once 
separate from the living man or woman may 
be moulded by the souls of others as readily 
as by its own soul, and even it seems by the 

63 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

souls of the living. It becomes a part for 
a while of that stream of images which I have 
compared to reflections upon water. But 
how does it follow that souls who never have 
handled the modelling tool or the brush, 
make perfect images .f^ Those materialisa- 
tions who imprint their powerful faces upon 
paraflBn wax, leave there sculpture that would 
have taken a good artist, making and imagin- 
ing, many hours. How did it follow that 
an ignorant woman could, as Henry More 
believed, project her vehicle in so good a 
likeness of a hare, that horse and hound 
and huntsman followed with the bugle blow- 
ing? Is not the problem the same as of 
those finely articulated scenes and patterns 
that come out of the dark, seemingly com- 
pleted in the winking of an eye, as we are 
lying half asleep, and of all those elaborate 
images that drift in moments of inspiration 

64 



ANIMA MUNDI 

or evocation before the mind's eye? Our 
animal spirits or vehicles are but as it were 
a condensation of the vehicle of Anima 
Mundi, and give substance to its images in 
the faint materialisation of our common 
thought, or more grossly when a ghost is our 
visitor. It should be no great feat, once 
those images have dipped into our vehicle, 
to take their portraits in the photographic 
camera. Henry More will have it that a 
hen scared by a hawk when the cock is tread- 
ing, hatches out a hawkheaded chicken (I 
am no stickler for the fact), because before 
the soul of the unborn bird could give the 
shape "the deeply impassioned fancy of the 
mother" called from the general cistern of 
form a competing image. "The soul of the 
world," he runs on, "interposes and insinu- 
ates into all generations of things while the 
matter is fluid and yielding, which would 
F Q5 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

induce a man to believe that she may not 
stand idle in the transformation of the vehicle 
of the daemons, but assist the fancies and de- 
sires, and so help to clothe them and to utter 
them according to their own pleasures ; or 
it may be sometimes against their wills as 
the unwieldiness of the mother's fancy forces 
upon her a monstrous birth." Though images 
appear to flow and drift, it may be that we 
but change in our relation to them, now los- 
ing, now finding with the shifting of our 
minds; and certainly Henry More speaks 
by the book, claiming that those images may 
be hard to the right touch as "pillars of 
crystal" and as solidly coloured as our own 
to the right eyes. Shelley, a good Platonist, 
seems in his earliest work to set this general 
soul in the place of God, an opinion, one may 
find from More's friend Gudworth now af- 
firmed, now combated, by classic authority; 

66 



ANIMA MUNDI 

but More would steady us with a definition. 
The general soul as apart from its vehicle is 
*'a substance incorporeal but without sense 
and animadversion pervading the whole 
matter of the universe and exercising a plas- 
tic power therein, according to the sundry 
predispositions and occasions, in the parts 
it works upon, raising such phenomena in the 
world, by directing the parts of the matter 
and their motion as cannot be resolved into 
mere mechanical powers." I must assume 
that "sense and animadversion," perception 
and direction, are always faculties of in- 
dividual soul, and that, as Blake said, "God 
only acts or is in existing beings or men." 

VII 

The old theological conception of the in- 
dividual soul as bodiless or abstract led to 
what Henry More calls "contradictory de- 

67 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

bate" as to how many angels "could dance 
booted and spurred upon the point of a 
needle," and made it possible for rationalist 
physiology to persuade us that our thought 
has no corporeal existence but in the mole- 
cules of the brain. Shelley was of opinion 
that the "thoughts which are called real or 
external objects" differed but in regularity 
of occurrence from "hallucinations, dreams 
and ideas of madmen," and noticed that he 
had dreamed, therefore lessening the differ- 
ence, "three several times between intervals 
of two or more years the same precise dream." 
If all our mental images no less than appari- 
tions (and I see no reason to distinguish) are 
forms existing in the general vehicle of Anima 
Mundi, and mirrored in our particular vehicle, 
many crooked things are made straight. I 
am persuaded that a logical process, or a 
series of related images, has body and period, 

68 



ANIMA MUNDI 

and I think of Anima Mundi as a great pool 
or garden where it spreads through allotted 
growth like a great water plant or branches 
more fragrantly in the air. Indeed as 
Spenser's Garden of Adonis : 

*' There is the first seminary 
Of all things that are born to live and die 
According to their kynds." 

The soul by changes of "vital congruity," 
More says, draws to it a certain thought, and 
this thought draws by its association the 
sequence of many thoughts, endowing them 
with a life in the vehicle meted out according 
to the intensity of the first perception. A 
seed is set growing, and this growth may go 
on apart from the power, apart even from the 
knowledge of the soul. If I wish to "trans- 
fer" a thought I may think, let us say, of 
Cinderella's slipper, and my subject may see 

69 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

an old woman coming out of a chimney; 
or going to sleep I may wish to wake at 
seven o'clock and, though I never think of 
it again, I shall wake upon the instant. 
The thought has completed itself, certain 
acts of logic, turns, and knots in the stem 
have been accomplished out of sight and out 
of reach as it were. We are always starting 
these parasitic vegetables and letting them 
coil beyond our knowledge, and may become, 
like that lady in Balzac who, after a life of 
sanctity, plans upon her deathbed to fly with 
her renounced lover. After death a dream, 
a desire she had perhaps ceased to believe in, 
perhaps ceased almost to remember, must 
have recurred again and again with its anguish 
and its happiness. We can only refuse to 
start the wandering sequence or, if start it 
does, hold it in the intellectual light where 
time gallops, and so keep it from slipping 

70 



ANIMA MUNDI 

down into the sluggish vehicle. The toil of 
the living is to free themselves from an end- 
less sequence of objects, and that of the dead 
to free themselves from an endless sequence 
of thoughts. One sequence begets another, 
and these have power because of all those 
things we do, not for their own sake but for 
an imagined good. 

VIII 

Spiritism, whether of folk-lore or of the 
seance room, the visions of Swedenborg, and 
the speculation of the Platonists and Japanese 
plays, will have it that we may see at certain 
roads and in certain houses old murders acted 
over again, and in certain fields dead hunts- 
men riding with horse and hound, or ancient 
armies fighting above bones or ashes. We 
carry to Anima Mundi our memory, and that 
memory is for a time our external world ; and 

71 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

all passionate moments recur again and again, 
for passion desires its own recurrence more 
than any event, and whatever there is of 
corresponding complacency or remorse is our 
beginning of judgment ; nor do we remember 
only the events of life, for thoughts bred of 
longing and of fear, all those parasitic vege- 
tables that have slipped through our fingers, 
come again like a rope's end to smite us upon 
the face ; and as Cornelius Agrippa writes : 
"We may dream ourselves to be consumed 
in flame and persecuted by daemons," and 
certain spirits have complained that they 
would be hard put to it to arouse those who 
died, believing they could not awake till a 
trumpet shrilled. A ghost in a Japanese 
play is set afire by a fantastic scruple, and 
though a Buddhist priest explains that the 
fire would go out of itself if the ghost but 
ceased to believe in it, it cannot cease to be- 

72 



ANIMA MUNDI 

lieve. Cornelius Agrippa called such dream- 
ing souls hobgoblins, and when Hamlet re- 
fused the bare bodkin because of what dreams 
may come, it was from no mere literary fancy. 
The soul can indeed, it appears, change these 
objects built about us by the memory, as it 
may change its shape; but the greater the 
change, the greater the effort and the sooner 
the return to the habitual images. Doubt- 
less in either case the effort is often beyond 
its power. Years ago I was present when a 
woman consulted Madame Blavatsky for a 
friend who saw her newly-dead husband 
nightly as a decaying corpse and smelt the 
odour of the grave. When he was dying, 
said Madame Blavatsky, he thought the 
grave the end, and now that he is dead can- 
not throw off that imagination. A Brahmin 
once told an actress friend of mine that he 
disliked acting, because if a man died play- 

73 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

ing Hamlet, he would be Hamlet in eternity. 
Yet after a time the soul partly frees itself 
and becomes "the shape changer" of the 
legends, and can cast, like the mediaeval 
magician, what illusions it would. There is 
an Irish countryman in one of Lady Gregory's 
books who had eaten with a stranger on the 
road, and some while later vomited, to dis- 
cover he had but eaten chopped up grass. 
One thinks, too, of the spirits that show them- 
selves in the images of wild creatures. 

IX 

The dead, as the passionate necessity wears 
out, come into a measure of freedom and may 
turn the impulse of events, started while 
living, in some new direction, but they can- 
not originate except through the living. Then 
gradually they perceive, although they are 
still but living in their memories, harmonies, 

74 



ANIMA MUNDI 

symbols, and patterns, as though all were 
being refashioned by an artist, and they are 
moved by emotions, sweet for no imagined 
good but in themselves, like those of children 
dancing in a ring; and I do not doubt that 
they make love in that union which Sweden- 
borg has said is of the whole body and seems 
from far off an incandescence. Hitherto 
shade has communicated with shade in mo- 
ments of common memory that recur like the 
figures of a dance in terror or in joy, but now 
they run together like to like, and their 
Covens and Fleets have rhythm and pattern. 
This running together and running of all to a 
centre and yet without loss of identity, has 
been prepared for by their exploration of 
their moral life, of its beneficiaries and its 
victims, and even of all its untrodden paths, 
and all their thoughts have moulded the 
vehicle and become event and circumstance. 

75 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

X 

There are two realities, the terrestrial and 
the condition of fire. All power is from the 
terrestrial condition, for there all opposites 
meet and there only is the extreme of choice 
possible, full freedom. And there the hetero- 
geneous is, and evil, for evil is the strain one 
upon another of opposites ; but in the con- 
dition of fire is all music and all rest. Be- 
tween is the condition of air where images 
have but a borrowed life, that of memory or 
that reflected upon them when they sym- 
bolise colours and intensities of fire, the place 
of shades who are "in the whirl of those who 
are fading," and who cry like those amorous 
shades in the Japanese play : 

"That we may acquire power 
Even in our faint substance, 
We will show forth even now, 
76 



ANIMA MUNDI 

And though it be but in a dream, 
Our form of repentance." 

After so many rhythmic beats the soul 
must cease to desire its images, and can, as 
it were, close its eyes. 

When all sequence comes to an end, time 
comes to an end, and the soul puts on the 
rhythmic or spiritual body or luminous body 
and contemplates all the events of its memory 
and every possible impulse in an eternal 
possession of itself in one single moment. 
That condition is alone animate, all the rest 
is phantasy, and from thence come all the 
passions, and some have held, the very heat 
of the body. 

Time drops in decay, 

Like a candle burnt out. 

And the mountains and the woods 

Have their day, have their day. 

77 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

What one, in the rout 
Of the fire-born moods, 
Has fallen away ? 

XI 

The soul cannot have much knowledge till 
it has shaken off the habit of time and of 
place, but till that hour it must fix its atten- 
tion upon what is near, thinking of objects 
one after another as we run the eye or the 
finger over them. Its intellectual power can- 
not but increase and alter as its perceptions 
grow simultaneous. Yet even now we seem 
at moments to escape from time in what w^e 
call prevision, and from place when we see 
distant things in a dream and in concurrent 
dreams. A couple of years ago, while in 
meditation, my head seemed surrounded by 
a conventional sun's rays, and when I went 
to bed I had a long dream of a woman with 

78 



ANIMA MUNDI 

her hair on fire. I awoke and Ht a candle, 
and discovered presently from the odour that 
in doing so I had set my own hair on fire. I 
dreamed very lately that I was writing a 
story, and at the same time I dreamed that 
I was one of the characters in that story and 
seeking to touch the heart of some girl in 
defiance of the author's intention ; and con- 
currently with all that, I was as another self 
trying to strike with the button of a foil a 
great china jar. The obscurity of the pro- 
phetic books of William Blake, which were 
composed in a state of vision, comes almost 
wholly from these concurrent dreams. Every- 
body has some story or some experience of the 
sudden knowledge in sleep or waking of some 
event, a misfortune for the most part hap- 
pening to some friend far off. 



79 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

XII 

The dead living in their memories, are, I 
am persuaded, the source of all that we call 
instinct, and it is their love and their desire, 
all unknowing, that make us drive beyond 
our reason, or in defiance of our interest it 
may be ; and it is the dream martens that, 
all unknowing, are master-masons to the liv- 
ing martens building about church windows 
their elaborate nests; and in their turn, the 
phantoms are stung to a keener delight from a 
concord between their luminous pure vehicle 
and our strong senses. It were to reproach 
the power or the beneficence of God, to be- 
lieve those children of Alexander who died 
wretchedly could not throw an urnful to the 
heap, nor that Gaesarea ^ murdered in child- 
hood, whom Gleopatra bore to Gaesar, nor 

* I have no better authority for Caesarea than Landor's play. 

80 



ANIMA MUNDI 

that so brief-lived younger Pericles Aspasia 
bore being so nobly born. 

XIII 

Because even the most wise dead can but 
arrange their memories as we arrange pieces 
upon a chess-board and obey remembered 
words alone, he who would turn magician 
is forbidden by the Zoroastrian oracle to 
change "barbarous words" of invocation. 
Communication with Anima Mundi is through 
the association of thoughts or images or ob- 
jects ; and the famous dead and those of 
whom but a faint memory lingers, can still 
— and it is for no other end that, all un- 
knowing, we value posthumous fame — tread 
the corridor and take the empty chair. A 
glove or a name can call their bearer; the 
shadows come to our elbow amid their old 
undisturbed habitations, and "materialisa- 
G 81 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

tion" itself is easier, it may be, among walls, 
or by rocks and trees, that carry upon them 
particles the vehicles cast off in some ex- 
tremity while they had still animate bodies. 
Certainly the mother returns from the 
grave, and with arms that may be visible and 
solid, for a hurried moment, can comfort a 
neglected child or set the cradle rocking ; and 
in all ages men have known and affirmed 
that when the soul is troubled, those that are 

a shade and a song : 

"live there. 

And live like winds of light on dark or stormy 

air." 

XIV 

Awhile they live again those passionate 
moments, not knowing they are dead, and 
then they know and may awake or half awake 
to be our visitors. How is their dream 
changed as Time drops away and their senses 

82 



ANIMA MUNDI 

multiply? Does their stature alter, do their 
eyes grow more brilliant? Certainly the 
dreams stay the longer, the greater their 
passion when alive: Helen may still open 
her chamber door to Paris or watch him from 
the wall, and know she is dreaming but be- 
cause nights and days are poignant or the 
stars unreckonably bright. Surely of the 
passionate dead we can but cry in words Ben 
Jonson meant for none but Shakespeare : 
"So rammed" are they "with life they can 
but grow in life with being." 

XV 

The inflowing from their mirrored life, 
who themselves receive it from the Con- 
dition of Fire, falls upon the Winding Path 
called the Path of the Serpent, and that in- 
flowing coming alike to men and to animals 
is called natural. There is another inflow 

83 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

which is not natural but intellectual, and is 
from the fire; and it descends through souls 
who pass for a lengthy or a brief period out 
of the mirror life, as we in sleep out of the 
bodily life, and though it may fall upon a 
sleeping serpent, it falls principally upon 
straight paths. In so far as a man is like all 
other men, the inflow finds him upon the 
winding path, and in so far as he is a saint or 
sage, upon the straight path. 

XVI 

Daemon and man are opposites ; man 
passes from heterogeneous objects to the 
simplicity of fire, and the Daemon is drawn 
to objects because through them he obtains 
power, the extremity of choice. For only 
in men's minds can he meet even those in 
the Condition of Fire who are not of his own 
kin. He, by using his mediatorial shades, 

84 



ANIMA MUNDI 

brings man again and again to the place of 
choice, heightening temptation that the choice 
may be as final as possible, imposing his own 
lucidity upon events, leading his victim to 
whatever among works not impossible is the 
most difiicult. He suffers with man as some 
firm-souled man suffers with the woman he 
but loves the better because she is extrava- 
gant and fickle. His descending power is 
neither the winding nor the straight line but 
zigzag, illuminating the passive and active 
properties, the tree's two sorts of fruit: it 
is the sudden lightning, for all his acts of 
power are instantaneous. We perceive in a 
pulsation of the artery, and after slowly 

decline. 

XVII 

Each Daemon is drawn to whatever man 
or, if its nature is more general, to whatever 
nation it most differs from, and it shapes into 

85 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

its own image the antithetical dream of man 
or nation. The Jews had already shown by 
the precious metals, by the ostentatious wealth 
of Solomon's temple, the passion that has 
made them the money-lenders of the modern 
world. If they had not been rapacious, lust- 
ful, narrow and persecuting beyond the people 
of their time, the incarnation had been im- 
possible; but it was an intellectual impulse 
from the Condition of Fire that shaped their 
antithetical self into that of the classic world. 
So always it is an impulse from some Daemon 
that gives to our vague, unsatisfied desire, 
beauty, a meaning and a form all can accept. 

XVIII 

Only in rapid and subtle thought, or in 
faint accents heard in the quiet of the mind, 
can the thought of the spirit come to us but 
little changed ; for a mind, that grasps ob- 

86 



ANIMA MUNDI 

jects simultaneously according to the degree 
of its liberation, does not think the same 
thought with the mind that sees objects one 
after another. The purpose of most reli- 
gious teaching, of the insistence upon the sub- 
mission to God's will above all, is to make 
certain of the passivity of the vehicle where 
it is most pure and most tenuous. When 
we are passive where the vehicle is coarse, we 
become mediumistic, and the spirits who 
mould themselves in that coarse vehicle can 
only rarely and with great difficulty speak 
their own thoughts and keep their own 
memory. They are subject to a kind of 
drunkenness and are stupefied, old writers 
said, as if with honey, and readily mistake 
our memory for their own, and believe them- 
selves whom and what we please. We be- 
wilder and overmaster them, for once they 
are among the perceptions of successive ob- 

87 



sir 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

jects, our reason, being but an instrument 
created and sharpened by those objects, is 
stronger than their intellect, and they can 
but repeat with brief glimpses from another 
state, our knowledge and our words. 

XIX 

A friend once dreamed that she saw many 
dragons climbing upon the steep side of a 
cliff and continually falling. Henry More 
thought that those who, after centuries of 
life, failed to find the rhythmic body and to 
pass into the Condition of Fire, were born 
again. Edmund Spenser, who was among 
More's masters, affirmed that nativity with- 
out giving it a cause : 

*' After that they againe retourned beene. 
They in that garden planted be agayne. 
And grow afresh, as they had never scene 
Fleshy corruption, nor mortal payne, 
88 



ANIMA MUNDI 

Some thousand years so doen they ther 

remayne, 
And then of him are clad with other hew, 
Or sent into the chaungeful world agayne. 
Till thither they retourn where first they 

grew : 
So like a wheele, around they roam from old 

to new." 

The dead who speak to us deny metem- 
psychosis, perhaps because they but know a 
little better what they knew alive ; while the 
dead in Asia, for perhaps no better reason, 
affirm it, and so we are left amid plausibil- 
ities and uncertainties. 

XX 

But certainly it is always to the Condition 
of Fire, where emotion is not brought to any 
sudden stop, where there is neither wall nor 
gate, that we would rise; and the mask 

89 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

plucked from the oak-tree is but my imagi- 
nation of rhythmic body. We may pray 
to that last condition by any name so long 
as we do not pray to it as a thing or a thought, 
and most prayers call it man or woman or 
child : 

'*For mercy has a human heart, 
Pity a human face." 

Within ourselves Reason and Will, who 
are the man and woman, hold out towards a 
hidden altar, a laughing or crying child. 

XXI 

When I remember that Shelley calls our 
minds "mirrors of the fire for which all thirst," 
I cannot but ask the question all have asked, 
"What or who has cracked the mirror .f^" I 
begin to study the only self that I can know, 
myself, and to wind the thread upon the 
perne again. 

90 



ANIMA MUNDI 

At certain moments, always unforeseen, I 
become happy, most commonly when at 
hazard I have opened some book of verse. 
Sometimes it is my own verse when, instead 
of discovering new technical flaws, I read with 
all the excitement of the first writing. Per- 
haps I am sitting in some crowded restaurant, 
the open book beside me, or closed, my ex- 
citement having over-brimmed the page. I 
look at the strangers near as if I had known 
them all my life, and it seems strange that 
I cannot speak to them : everything fills 
me with affection, I have no longer any fears 
or any needs; I do not even remember that 
this happy mood must come to an end. It 
seems as if the vehicle had suddenly grown 
pure and far extended and so luminous that 
one half imagines that the images from Anima 
Mundi, embodied there and drunk with that 
sweetness, would, as some country drunkard 

91 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

who had thrown a wisp into his own thatch, 
burn up time. 

It may be an hour before the mood passes, 
but latterly I seem to understand that I 
enter upon it the moment I cease to hate. I 
think the common condition of our life is 
hatred — I know that this is so with me — 
irritation with public or private events or 
persons. There is no great matter in for- 
ge tfulness of servants, or the delays of trades- 
men, but how forgive the ill-breeding of 
Carlyle, or the rhetoric of Swinburne, or 
that woman who murmurs over the dinner- 
table the opinion of her daily paper? And 
only a week ago last Sunday, I hated the 
spaniel who disturbed a partridge on her 
nest, a trout who took my bait and yet broke 
away unhooked. The books say that our 
happiness comes from the opposite of hate, 
but I am not certain, for we may love un- 



ANIMA MUNDI 

happily. And plainly, when I have closed 
a book too stirred to go on reading, and in 
those brief intense visions of sleep, I have 
something about me that, though it makes 
me love, is more like innocence. I am in 
the place where the daemon is, but I do not 
think he is with me until I begin to make a 
new personality, selecting among those images, 
seeking always to satisfy a hunger grown out 
of conceit with daily diet ; and yet as I write 
the words, "I select," I am full of uncertainty, 
not knowing when I am the finger, when the 
clay. Once, twenty years ago, I seemed to 
awake from sleep to find my body rigid, and 
to hear a strange voice speaking these words 
through my lips as through lips of stone : 
"We make an image of him who sleeps, and 
it is not him who sleeps, and we call it Em- 
manuel." 



93 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

XXII 

As I go up and down my stair and pass the 
gilded Moorish wedding-chest where I keep 
my "barbarous words," I wonder will I take 
to them once more, for I am baffled by those 
voices that still speak as to Odysseus but as 
the bats ; or now that I shall in a little be 
growing old, to some kind of simple piety 
like that of an old woman. 

May 9, 1917. 



94 



EPILOGUE 

My Dear "Maurice" — I was often in 
France before you were born or when you 
were but a little child. When I went for the 
first or second time Mallarme had just written : 
"All our age is full of the trembling of the 
veil of the temple." One met everywhere 
young men of letters who talked of magic. 
A distinguished English man of letters asked 
me to call with him on Stanislas de Gaeta 
because he did not dare go alone to that mys- 
terious house. I met from time to time with 
the German poet Doukenday, a grave Swede 
whom I only discovered after years to have 
been Strindberg, then looking for the philos- 
opher's stone in a lodging near the Luxem- 
bourg; and one day in the chambers of 

95 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

Stuart Merrill the poet, I spoke with a young 
Arabic scholar who displayed a large, roughly- 
made gold ring which had grown to the shape 
of his finger. Its gold had no hardening alloy, 
he said, because it was made by his master, 
a Jewish Rabbi, of alchemical gold. My 
critical mind — was it friend or enemy ? — 
mocked, and yet I was delighted. Paris was 
as legendary as Connaught. This new pride, 
that of the adept, was added to the pride of 
the artist. Villiers de LTsle Adam, the 
haughtiest of men, had but lately died. I 
had read his Axel slowly and laboriously as 
one reads a sacred book — my French was 
very bad — and had applauded it upon the 
stage. As I could not follow the spoken 
words, I was not bored even where Axel and 
the Commander discussed philosophy for a 
half -hour instead of beginning their duel. If 
I felt impatient it was only that they delayed 

96 



EPILOGUE 

the coming of the adept Janus, for I hoped to 
recognise the moment when Axel cries: "I 
know that lamp, it was burning before Solo- 
mon"; or that other when he cries: "As 
for living, our servants will do that for us." 

The movement of letters had been haughty 
even before Magic had touched it. Rim- 
baud had sung: "Am I an old maid that I 
should fear the embrace of death?" And 
everywhere in Paris and in London young 
men boasted of the garret, and claimed to 
have no need of what the crowd values. 

Last summer you, who were at the age I 
was w^hen first I heard of Mallarme and of 
Verlaine, spoke much of the French poets 
young men and women read to-day. Claudel 
I already somewhat knew, but you read to 
me for the first time from Jammes a dialogue 
between a poet and a bird, that made us cry, 
and a whole volume of Peguy's Mystere de 
H 97 



PER AMIGA SILENTIA LUNAE 

la Charite de Jeanne (TArc. Nothing re- 
mained the same but the preoccupation with 
rehgion, for these poets submitted every- 
thing to the Pope, and all, even Claudel, a 
proud oratorical man, affirmed that they saw 
the world with the eyes of vine-dressers and 
charcoal-burners. It was no longer the soul, 
self -moving and self -teaching — the magical 
soul — but Mother France and Mother 
Church. 

Have not my thoughts run through a like 
round, though I have not found my tradition 
in the Catholic Church, which was not the 
church of my childhood, but where the tra- 
dition is, as I believe, more universal and 

more ancient ? 

W. B. Y. 

May 11, 1917. 



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